I'm having a great time with Wasteland 2. It has a few dumb mechanics, a generic story, and occasional bugs, but it's really fun. Planning your positions prior to starting turn-based combat is rewarding. Bits of humor and consequences for your actions make the story engaging, even if it's not that creative. Overall, it's strong enough and similar enough to the classic Fallout games that I feel like it could have been a classic entry in that series.
I have only had the game for 2 days, but I am having so much fun with it! It is very "smart," immersive, and intense. It also runs beautifully - looks fantastic, and feels silky smooth. I understand the latter portion of the game loses some momentum, but so far, I am really having a great time with it.
I haven't played "System Rift" due to its mediocre reviews, but "Criminal Past" was a masterpiece - which continued to grow in its postmodern, sentimental brilliance through the epilogue. I can't believe how beautiful the world of Deus Ex has continued to be. The original Deus Ex is one of a handful of games that deserve recognition as a work of art - but I never would have thought that a DLC for a triple-A sequel would deserve the same praise. Everything about it is tinged with uncertainty and even a sense that the truth is unknowable or even irrelevant, but nothing is lacking in sincerity or weight - even without control or knowledge of the objective reality, our actions matter, and our value as human beings depends not on outcomes, but on how we make our decisions. Brilliant story. Gameplay is strong & similar to core game, with some clever twists. I don't want to go back to real life.
I had so much fun with the first few hours of this hilarious, beautiful, seemingly-literary, point-and-click-revival mystery game that I made my best friend install it and play simultaneously with me. We absolutely loved the characters, humor, thickening plots, and introspection -- at least, we did, until we reached the end. Apparently some people enjoyed the ending, but it was enough to make me feel negatively about the game as a whole. I will not spoil it, of course, but it soured us both on the game. The ending made us both feel that the whole "mystery" had been arbitrary, that there weren't any deeper meanings in the story, and that there weren't any player actions that had meaningful consequences. Everything we thought we had been enjoying looked like a farce in retrospect. It's hard, therefore, to make a recommendation on whether the overwhelming brilliance I was appreciating during the first 90% of the game justifies playing it. My persisting feeling about the game is just that it was dumb and a waste of my time.
I played ~65 hours to complete the main game and expansion on "hard" difficulty. If you like zombies, parkour, and urban exploration, you'll have a great time with Dying Light. I love all three of these things, and I'm kind of amazed that anyone put them together in a video game. It's by no means an artistic masterpiece. There's a lot of dumb stuff in here, and if you slow down enough to focus on any one element or mechanic in detail, you'll find flaws. (The controversial DLC ending is arguably an exception - I liked it, and I found it 'artful.') But, the game is meant to be played a bit manically, leaping between rooftops or dropping flares behind you as you sprint away from spooky night-zombies, and when you're doing this, the myriad mostly-competent systems work together well enough to create an escapist dream.
I've spent more time playing this game than any other. I still haven't seen it all. The sense of wonder is still with me when I think about the city in the southeast of the map that looks like Vivec but that I never explored, or the Tribunal expansion that I never even finished. This is the game that defined the paradigm that subsequent Elder Scrolls games have refined and streamlined. However, beyond its expansiveness, I wonder what value, if any, this game would bring to a modern first-time gamer. The combat, characters, and quest -- after experiencing several dozen of them -- reveal themselves to be quite primitive. The game is truly more of a sandbox than a simulation of a living world, and my playthroughs often degenerated, sooner or later, into efforts to exploit the spell & potion systems. I think it's worth experiencing if you have the time to put aside, but the first impression may be jarring, and there may not be enough depth here to justify the investment.
